Chatting about the Brain with a professor of Neuroscience

Dr. Kevin Mitchell is associate professor of neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. We chat about the brain and human behaviour for science week 2024 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Grasp a granny, you glamorous Anthony's. Welcome to the Blind Eye Podcast. If this is your first podcast, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the Lord of this podcast. It's Science Week 2024, and every year, I always do a Science Week podcast where Science Week set me up with a scientist, and we have a chat with the aim of democratizing science. And this week, I'm going to be speaking to a professor of neuroscience. So, Science Week is a national celebration of science in Ireland. It's running from the 10th to the 17th of November. And all around Ireland, there's going to be hundreds of events for kids,

• 1:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  for adults, for people of all ages. This year's theme is regeneration. So, go to sfi.ie to learn about this year's Science Week and to see what events are happening near you this week from the 10th to the 17th. So, this week, I'm going to be chatting to Dr. Kevin Mitchell. He's A professor of genetics and neuroscience up in Trinity College Dublin. And he's, he's a proper listener to this podcast. He's a perpetual Declan. He's a steaming Quiva. So he listens every week and we had great crack. But before I get into that conversation, I want to tell you that my short film, my short film,

• 2:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did You Read About Arsene Fogarty, which is based on my short story, The Same Name, that's actually coming out this week. Thursday, the fourteenth of November, at ten past ten at night on RTE Two. That short film will be, will be debuted and then it'll be on the RTE Player afterwards. I think there's a way to watch the RTE Player internationally as well. It's a film about a man who drags a fridge from Dublin down to Limerick and it's set in two thousand and eight. It stars the wonderful Robbie Sheehan. There's lots of amazing actors in it. I'm going to keep that a secret. It was directed by James Cotter, who I've been working with for years.

• 3:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I composed the soundtrack to it, cause why the fuck not? It's my first time, it's my first time getting a short story and adapting it into a script. And then seeing this on film.

• 3:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  I fucking love it. The crew were incredible. Lots of people worked on this to make something that I'm really, really happy with, that everybody's really happy with and I can't wait for ye to see it. And I want to speak again about failure and why failure doesn't exist on a long enough timescale. The last time I like wrote a script, wrote a fucking script and then handed this to a director and then had that made into, into a piece of television. The last time I, I did that purely would have been twenty eleven, thirteen years ago. I was in my twenties.

• 4:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  It was a Chan- Channel Four, Rubber Bandits, Channel Four pilot. And I hadn't a clue what I was doing and I spent, first off. It was just out of nowhere. Channel four wanted to give you a pilot. Channel four want a Rubber Bandits pilot. So you just go, oh, fuck. Okay. The longest script I've ever written before that was maybe three minutes long. Little comedy sketches for an RTE TV show called Republic of Telly back around, around 2010. And now it's like, here's a half an hour pilot. Write a fucking pilot. Invent characters, create a story, wr- write an entire half hour script at a, at the highest professional level.

• 4:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause it was Channel four and it was 2011 and that meant something back then. The fir- the first Irish pilot commissioned by Channel four since Father Ted. So it was a lot of pressure at that age. It's terrifying. So you either go, no thanks, Channel four. I don't know how to write pilots. Or, okay, fuck it, I'll give it a go. So I locked myself away into my room. And I bought a lot of books about how to write TV scripts. And I, I studied my favorite TV shows and my favorite sitcoms and I tried to reverse engineer them. And I spent a year favorishly on my own in my room, writing a half an hour television pilot,

• 5:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  a script that had to be handed to a director. And that director, it was a fella called Declan Lowny, absolute legend, who directed a bunch of Father Ted. And he was, he was Beyonce's live director, so a world-class director who would then make that into TV. So I did, and it failed. A TV pilot is when like a, a channel comes to you and says, we're going to invest money for you to write and make one episode of, of a TV show. And if it's good, we've turned this into a TV series and your entire life will change. And this was 2011 and I spent the year writing this thing and it didn't get turned into a TV series.

• 6:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  It got rejected. So it, it failed. And it was, it was a painful failure because what happens is. If you make a TV pilot and it gets rejected by a channel and they invest a bunch of money in it and that doesn't get made into a series, you turn into toxic waste for about two years. Nobody will commission you. No one wants to touch you. No one wants to be known. No one wants to commission the act that are known as the ones with a failed pilot. The ones where Channel Four invested a lot of money and they got nothing on their return. They got a failed pilot so that money was pissed against the wall. It's very cutthroat and for me at the time, I internalized

• 6:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  that failure massively. I allowed that failure to define my worth as a person. I allowed that failure to make me feel as if I'm not creative, I'm not good at writing, I'm shit, that anything I'd done before that was good was a complete accident. You become associated with failure. People go, "Oh, you had a big Channel Four pilot. What happened with that?" "Oh, they didn't make it into a series." Oh shit, really? Big massive failure that I completely internalized and I allowed it to greatly impact my sense of self-worth and self-esteem, which is horseshit. That's fucking bullshit. My first ever TV script, I didn't train how to be a writer, didn't even have a

• 7:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  leave insert. What I did have was an innate creativity and a unique voice. But now, years on, I realise that's not enough. That's not enough. You get good at writing and you get professional through practice and failing consistently. And that, that failure, that failure of spending a year writing a Channel Four pilot and then it getting rejected and becoming toxic in the industry for two years, that's one of the best things that ever happened to me. The amount of learning I did while putting myself under that much pressure. I got to work with professionals like fucking Declan Lowny, got to see how a film set works. I got to see how words in my head on a page can actually translate to the screen. I got to make loads

• 8:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  and loads of fucking mistakes. Very expensive mistakes, but it wasn't my money, it was Channel Four's. And I got my first big, massive, gigantic failure that crippled me to my very core and led me to understand that. Failure is, it's simply part of the process. You have to fail. You must fail. Trying to avoid it is pointless. And failure doesn't have to be a big, bad, painful thing. It's an inevitable, unavoidable part of being a professional artist, a professional writer. There's no such thing as a failure that isn't a massive learning experience. When you fail, you come out of it with all these new skills and lessons learned. Every failure informs a future success.

• 9:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  While I was writing that, the failed Channel 4 script in my, in my fucking twenties, in order to do that, I was learning skills of story structuring, world building, fucking character development, conflict, subtext. Lessons that then come back to me a few years later when I decide to write short stories. When I decide, right, fuck that, I'm not writing TV anymore, I'm gonna write short stories. When I first started writing short stories, I'm now not approaching it as a novice because I had the script writing experience. So now thirteen years later, I'm adapting one of my short stories. I'm back full circle, adapting a short story into a film script.

• 9:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  And just by sheer chance, sheer accident, like six people on the film crew also worked on my, on my TV pilot from thirteen years ago. And this time around, the work isn't a fucking failure. This short film, this short film that we've made, I can really stand over it. It's, I'm really proud of it. And I don't look at it and go, oh, I wish I did that bit better. I wish that was better. No, it's a proper, solid, mature piece of work. There's no such thing as failure on a long enough time scale. All failures inform future successes. The only thing comparable to failure is doing nothing because you were scared to try. Fear of failure.

• 10:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  We'll have you doing nothing, procrastinating to avoid the, the pain of potential failure. But fuck that, just fail. Just whatever it is you're doing, whatever your passion is that you're pursuing. Fail, fail like a mad bastard, keep failing, try to fail, seek out failure. Instead of looking for the good idea, go with the bad idea and follow through on it. Free yourself up from the fear of failure so that you're playful, what you're looking for is playfulness. And most importantly, be cringe. I know a lot of really talented people who haven't created the art that they want to create because they're so afraid of being cringe.

• 11:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  There is no, there's no way, it's, it's, it's impossible to put your work out there and not be cringe. You have to be cringe. If you're the person in your friends group and let's just say you want to release an album. Right? You fancy yourself as a musician and you'd love to release a fucking album full of songs. And you're just in your friends group. The moment you go to your friends and say, I'm releasing an album, I'm gonna fucking do it, I'm making songs. You're gonna have at least six months of them thinking you're, you're mad. Your friends are gonna laugh at you behind your back. What the fuck are they doing? They're making an album. Oh my god, cringe.

• 12:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  People are gonna ta- people you know are gonna talk about you behind your back if, if you want to make actual art. And what I mean by that is,

• 12:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  if you're doing, I'm not saying cover versions isn't art, but if you're doing something that's safe, like cover versions, X factory type stuff. I'm not saying that that's not art, but I'm saying that it, it's low risk, it's low stakes. But if you're like, I'm releasing original material, I'm being vulnerable, I'm expressing something within myself. Your friends are gonna laugh at you behind your back for maybe a year. Strangers are gonna bully you. Strangers would come out of the woodwork to bully you. Like I remember in the, the year 2000, before social media, I was still in secondary school. Make, making prank phone calls.

• 13:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I remember we made a GeoCities website in school, a GeoCities website. I'm not even gonna tell you what the fuck that was. The year 2000, putting out prank phone calls. And within two weeks, websites used to have a thing called a guestbook back then. Within two weeks, there were strangers writing nasty messages going, "Who do you think you are? You don't think you're actually gonna get, make a career out of prank phone calls? You don't think you're actually gonna become a comedian, do you?" That's just what happens. And I think I've, I've dealt with pretty much that every single week. It doesn't go away. Every single week for about 20 years. To be honest, like even if you're in art college or studying music,

• 13:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  especially if what you're doing is unique or original, you're gonna be cringe and people are really gonna cringe. They're gonna cringe and they're gonna be embarrassed for you on your behalf. Because self-expression is really, really fucking embarrassing. And you're gonna have to get up and do your songs to two people in the audience. And they might have their backs turned to you. Or you might have to read your poetry to nobody. And if you wanna be an actor, you're gonna have to be in the play that no one shows up to. Or the short film on YouTube that has 50 views. And people are gonna pity you. They're gonna pity you and they're gonna cringe and their skin will crawl. And they'll be like, "Please stop, please stop publicly humiliating yourself. Please stop."

• 14:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like I'm wearing a plastic bag in my head for the past 20 years. You're gonna have to release music, release an EP and put it on Spotify. And it's gonna get 15, 20 plays a month. And everyone's gonna see that it gets 20 plays a month. And everybody's gonna know that those plays are from you. And maybe you're ma and your friends are gonna talk about it behind your back. And they're gonna cringe, they're gonna cringe. And you will be an object of embarrassment and cringe. If you want to, if you want genuine self-expression, if you wanna find your own artistic voice and you wanna go from being a civilian

• 15:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  to being a professional artist, musician, actor, writer, fuck anything that involves, like a fucking influencer. Let's just say even a fitness influencer. You like lifting weights, maybe you went and studied fitness and now you wanna make the leap from being someone who likes going to the gym to someone who's posting videos about going to the gym. You're gonna be cringe, your friends are gonna laugh about you behind your back. You're gonna have to be cringe if you wanna succeed at that for a long time. If you do anything that involves self-expression and most importantly, vulnerability, then you're gonna be cringe. You're going to be cringe for all of your friends and people are gonna laugh at you

• 15:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  behind your back and possibly think that you're mentally ill. And you know why? Because your confidence in self-expression and bravery makes them feel insecure. But that feeling of insecurity is a little bit too painful, so the way that they avoid it is by laughing at you and experiencing secondhand embarrassment and cringe. And then you stick at it and then something happens, you get a little bit of success or recognition and all of a sudden you stop being cringe. And every single artist who you admire, singer, poet, actor, whoever the fuck it is, they spent minimum two years being bitched about by all their friends and being an object of embarrassment and ridicule.

• 16:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fear of failure, fear of being cringe. And, and you know what? Like I'm a middle-aged man now and like I said, I've been doing this for 20 fucking years. I, I would rather be here with my podcast saying to you, I can't wait for you to tune into TV on fucking Thursday on RT2 and see the short film that I just made. I'm glad that I'm saying that than being the age I am now, being in a different job that I don't like and saying to myself, fuck it, I was so, I was so frightened, I was so frightened in my twenties and my early thirties. I was so afraid.

• 17:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  That of of being cringe and I was so afraid of failing that I actually I did nothing. I did nothing and on hindsight, fuck it, I think I actually had the talent and ability to do something back then, but I was too scared and I didn't. I was too, I was too scared to try, so I did nothing. I'm very grateful I didn't make that choice and the price that I paid is cringe, consistent, continual cringe. There's someone cringing about me right now. There's grown adult men on the internet who I've never met and they they get violently angry because there's a fella called Blind Boy who wears a plastic bag on his head. Take off the bag, take off the fucking bag. I can't take you seriously. I don't care. I I don't give a fuck.

• 18:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Please cringe, cringe on my behalf, work away, work away. I'm not hurting anybody. I'm a good person. If me exploring curiosity and creativity and expressing myself makes you feel embarrassed for me, there's nothing I can do for you. That's your business. And the artists who do nothing because they were because they're scared to try, in my experience, that tends to be the majority and they can be very bitter and very begrudgy and they begrudge other people's, other artists' successes. And and one of the reasons they begrudge is because other people's efforts remind them of their fear of trying.

• 18:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  And also, if you're very, very begrudgy, if you're very harsh on other artists, if you're the one doing the cringing, oh, my God, look at them up on stage doing their original material, their acoustic songs. Oh, fuck, is this song about their ex-girlfriend? Oh, this is so cringe. That person who's doing all that cringing, that's how hard they are on themselves when they try to create anything. So if you are that person, you find yourself begrudging other people's art or being unnecessarily harsh on the other people's art. Instead, try and put effort into trying to understand why that person's art might be

• 19:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  good, or even if you don't like it, try and get into the frame of reference of understanding why the artist likes it.

• 19:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that compassionate, empathic approach to other people's art, if you can do that, then that compassion would bubble up when you yourself try to create something. And then the fear of failure won't be as big and you won't be as harsh on yourself. But you have to fail, you must fail. And you have to be cringe, cringe and failure guaranteed all the time. Neither of those things make you a bad person in any way. I think I'm talking about this because I was given an award last week, I A D T, which is like an art college in Dunleary. They, they made me an honorary fellow and I had a cap and a gown and all that shit

• 20:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  at the, the graduation ceremony for the students. And it was lovely to get that, to be, to be made an honorary fellow. I don't really know what it means, but anyway, I didn't know I had, I didn't know, first off, I didn't know there was going to be like a thousand people there. Secondly, I didn't know I'd have to make a speech. So I had to get up and pull a speech out of my fucking arse. And I spoke about failure. I was speaking to, to art graduates. These are students who've just graduated from college, who are going from being students into being professional artists. And I was being made an honorary fellow at their university. So afterwards I was like, fuck it, I told them about failure, but I never told them about cringe.

• 21:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fear of failure and fear of cringe is often the reason why talented people don't make art. And it comes down to shame and guilt. Fear of failure, that's, that's a very internal thing, that's an internal battle, that's that private guilt.

• 21:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  What does it mean, what's the price that I pay if I fail? Well, I've based my sense of self and self-esteem around how good I am at an art, as an artist. So if I fail, that means I'm a worthless human being who deserves to experience feelings like, like guilt and disappointment and private humiliation. Whereas fear of, fear of cringe, that's shame, that's public, that's the collective. What if everybody sees me fail and then they feel embarrassed for me? Wouldn't that be awful? Oh my God. What if I tell all my friends I'm gonna, I'm making an EP? And then I do a gig and nobody shows up? And my friends are standing at my gig out of politeness? And they're all cringing and I know they're talking about me in the smoking area.

• 22:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's a guarantee, that's a given, that's gonna happen. Failure's gonna happen and cringe is gonna happen. And neither of those things make you a bad person. Nothing about expressing yourself, being creative, putting out your work, putting out your art. None of that makes you a bad person. You're not doing anything harmful or hurtful to anybody. Creating nothing and instead choosing to be a begrudger, quick to call everybody else's art shit and creating nothing yourself, that comes with a short-term gratification. But in that situation, you're actually being a bit of a goal. So choose creativity and choose cringe and choose failure.

• 22:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I better get into my Science Week interview now. If you wanna see my fucking short film, Did You Read About Arsene Fogarty? This Thursday, RT2, ten past ten at night time. And then it's gonna be on the RTE Player for a few weeks afterwards. Here's my chat about neuroscience, mental health, neuroplasticity, the brain, with the wonderful Dr Kevin Mitchell, Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. Kevin's written two books as well if you wanna check him out. One of them is called Inace: How the Wiring of the Brain Shapes Who We Are. And the other book he wrote is called Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will.

• 23:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  So Professor Kevin Mitchell, um, what's the crack? How are you getting on?

• 23:48Speaker 03

  I'm getting on all right. How are you, Blind Boy?

• 23:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  I am, I'm fantastic. I'm, well, I just woke up this morning and saw that Trump is the president of America. So I'm, I'm in a state of shock. I mean, I'm, I'm in a state of, uh, I don't know what I feel today. So the same way I didn't know what, what I felt when he got elected in 2016. It's just, it's, it's one of those mornings, I spoke about it in last week's podcast. And you know, you're, you're a professor of neuroscience. So since about 2016, right? The big one was David Bowie's death.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's when I first woke up in the morning, picked up my phone and then went, oh my God, that's awful. And the next one after that was Brexit and then after that it's Trump. And now, like yesterday, I was, what I was dreading was, oh no. I'm, I don't want to go to bed and I'm going to wake up and look at my phone and receive some, receive information I don't know about.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know what I mean? I'm scared of my phone now.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I was the same.

• 24:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Something I would like to ask you as, as a neuroscientist, and it's, it's something I, I wonder about a lot. Like since, let's say 2011. So 2011 is when I first got a smartphone. And it's when most other people got a smartphone. And this has massively changed my experience of simply being alive.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like even something as crazy as having a social media account. You know, having a social media account that really, that there is an avatar of myself.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  An avatar of myself that I project onto a social media account and this avatar interacts with other people. And our social media avatars are very different to how we are in real life.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  A lot of people, the person they are on Instagram, the person they are on Twitter, the person they are on TikTok. These are three very different, differently curated individuals. The person they are on Facebook, like people on Facebook now, they just keep that account open to let relatives know what they're up to.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, surely that's changing my brain.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I mean, it's really, really interesting to think about what it means to be a self and how we kind of maintain and like you said, curate our, our own biographical narratives and the stories that we tell to ourselves about ourselves and the way that we project to other people. I guess my feeling is we, we already do that. We always have done that to a certain extent in that your, you know, yourself at work is a different persona than yourself at home or yourself when you're down the pub or with your, you know, your friends on your soccer team or whatever it is. And so I, I think we each have, uh, you know, multiple personas that we,

• 26:48Speaker 03

  that we employ in different scenarios. But, uh, but I agree that the social media thing just kind of exacerbates that, probably exaggerates it a bit. Um, and you know, I don't, there's all kinds of discussion these days about what it's doing to our, uh, to our minds and to our brains and to the nature of our social relations. I guess my feeling is that we can have discussions about the nature of our social relations actually without invoking neuroscience. I don't think the neuroscience necessarily adds much to those conversations because we, you know, we know that it's changing the way that we interact with people in different, um, different situations and scenarios and so on.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  And, you know, if I told you that when someone was on Instagram and I put them in an FMRI scanner and this bit of their brain lit up or that bit, I don't know, would you be much the wiser? Not, I don't really think so.

• 27:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay. Yeah. Cause my, the reason I was asking you, and this is from like, you know, I'm here to learn. I don't know much about neuroscience, but I suppose what I was asking was.

• 27:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, I definitely feel differently.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  As a person having used social media for fourteen, fifteen years.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Even, like, I remember a couple of years ago, like, Twitter isn't as bad as it used to. It's, Twitter's pretty bad, but it has changed. And there used, Twitter used to be, you have to be very careful what you say.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because if you say the wrong thing or the slightly wrong thing, you become the main character for the day and you can become globally viral. So we would do people, the word Twitter-proofing. When you were saying something, is this Twitter-proofed? Can this statement be misinterpreted in any way whereby a bad faith actor can blow this out of proportion? So you Twitter-proof your tweets. But then after a while, I found myself Twitter-proofing my own thoughts.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 28:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  My private thoughts, which are just me, I was going, no, that's problematic. No, you can't think that. Oh, my God, what if that got retweeted? Retweet what? My fucking thoughts?

• 29:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it felt very frightening.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it felt like I was losing grip on reality. And the reason I'm asking you is, it's about the mind versus the brain.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 29:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that simply a behavioral thing that I can change? Or has something in my neural pathways changed now as a result of social media?

• 29:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think any, anything you do is going to change your brain. Because, because our brains are basically are made to change. That's one of their main jobs is to be plastic. To enable us to, to adapt to experiences that we've had and to, you know, refine our behavior in relation to the things that we learned, you know, the last time we did something and it turned out well or it turned out badly. You know, if you ended up main character on Twitter for a day, then you learned something about that. Well, in the process of that, your brain changes. So whenever we form a kind of a memory, whenever we refine a habit or change what we think

• 30:06Speaker 03

  we might do in a different scenario, some, something in our brain is changing. That's just the physical substrate of memory, basically.

• 30:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  So that's a big one to grasp and it's it's an uncomfortable one to grasp because when it comes to the brain, the brain is my thoughts, it's my sense of self, my identity, but something that isn't very difficult to grasp. And I just want to see if this comparison is accurate to you as an neuroscientist. I love going to the gym, right? I love going to the gym. Sometimes I'm busy, so I don't get to go to the gym as much. So let's take something as simple as my, my, my chest muscles. If I get a good crack at the gym and I can go there twice a week for a month and I'm bench pressing, then my chest muscles are going to get larger, stronger and harder. That's just what happens. But then I'm busy, I'm touring, I'm not going to the gym. And now

• 30:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  another month passes and those chest muscles are no longer as strong as they are. But I don't say to myself, oh, my God, that's it. That's gone forever. I'll never get my chest muscles back. I understand. No, just go to the gym again and they'll get bigger and they'll get smaller again and they'll get bigger. Is is neuroplasticity a bit like that? Is is the muscles of the body, is the brain respond similarly? When I bench press, that's me behaving a certain way, performing an action and then my muscles respond to that behavior and grow and get stronger.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there is that sort of responsiveness. It doesn't work in the same way in that, you know, it's not the case that if you, you know, really think hard or you do some kind of activity that, you know, certain parts of your brain are going to grow much bigger. At least I don't believe it is. There's there are, there are some sort of studies out there that suggest that that might be the case. I don't find them hugely convincing. There's some studies of like London taxi cab drivers who navigate around London by by memory. And there's some studies that suggest that some parts of their brain, this little part called the hippocampus, which is involved in spatial navigation is actually bigger. In those taxi drivers than in other people, I'm skeptical about it, but I know that the guys

• 32:16Speaker 03

  who who did that research are trying to replicate it at a much larger scale right now. So it's one of those things we don't really know about. But I think the main thing that happens is that just some connections in the brain get stronger and some connections get weaker. So it's not that there's a there's a growth per se, it's that there's a change in the pattern of connections and those patterns basically embody kinds of memories. So, you know, really simple example would be like Pavlov's dogs. So Pavlov, you know, trained these dogs to, um, when he he gave them some food, he would ring a bell. And eventually, when they just heard the bell, they would start to salivate because they knew that the bell meant that some food was coming, right?

• 33:01Speaker 03

  So they were getting, uh, they were just anticipating that. And that kind of thing, we know, you know, fairly well about the the basis of that is that some neurons are really forming connections between each other that weren't very strong before, right? Because, you know, a bell, the neurons that carry information about a bell and ones that carry information about the food, there was no reason for them to be linked to each other because they hadn't been paired in prior experience for these dogs. But once they started to be paired over and over again, then the dogs learned to make that connection. And it, you know, we think at least that it literally happens at the level of connections between neurons that then get now, now, now the bell has a different meaning for the animal.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  So as we go through our lives, we're trying to make meaning of of what's going on in the world. We're trying to make sense of our sensory inputs, of the scenarios that we're in, we're trying to predict what might happen, we're trying to think, what could I do here? Would that turn out well? What's the best option for me? And all of that is informed by the things that we've learned as we go through our lives. So we're kind of collecting, you know, information and building up this knowledge, kind of a model of the world and a model of ourselves as we do that. And that all involves some kind of neural plasticity.

• 34:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  But sometimes that's.

• 34:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sometimes that's not always helpful. As as in, like, put it this way, and this is something I'd love to know from a neuroplasticity point of view. So I'm I'm someone who had, at one point in my life, I had anxiety, social anxiety so bad that I was agoraphobic. Okay. And I couldn't go outside, I couldn't leave my house, and I'm talking, this lasted more than a year. Now I'm somebody who can go and do gigs, I can walk freely amongst crowds, socially, I can't even remember what it was like to be afraid of a crowd. I would, I don't like using the word cured, but I am not a socially anxious person anymore when it comes to crowds going out.

• 35:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  I used cognitive behavioural therapy to get to where I am. Gradual exposure. It took a long time, but I gradually exposed myself to social situations and learned the fear, the prediction, the incorrect prediction that I made, this terrifying thing, it didn't happen. Yeah. Each time I grew in confidence until eventually now I'm able to socialise, now everything is okay.

• 35:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, and now, now it's not even something I think of. It's not even, I'm, if you say to me, you have to go into a crowd of thirty thousand people, the things that I'm concerned about are quite rational things. Is there exit? What if there's an emergency? That's all fine, but there's no anxiety.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, I mean, that's a great example because.

• 35:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  What happened in my brain? Like, I know my behaviour, but what happened in my brain?

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what happens in your, in your brain when you develop? So first of all, you know, we all of us, as we go through our lives, we develop habits, right? So all of that stuff that we've, we've learned, we've internalised from prior experiences and our, this, this model of the world, we've internalised things that manifest as, first of all, as habits of thought, just some things occur to us.

• 36:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  That automatic thinking, is that what we call in cognitive psychology, automatic thinking?

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And so the more that you're thinking of of things and you just kind of wear some ruts in your mental lanes, as it were. And yeah, so we, you know, we may have typical kinds of responses in a conversation or typical attitudes and policies and so on, in response to various things. And then, of course, they can show up as habits of action, so that we just habitually behave in certain ways. To be honest, a lot of that is good, right? And you know, that what that means is that we we don't have to think in every moment, what should I do here from first principles and work through all the possible permutations and scenarios and everything. It's just, we have a scenario, we're familiar with it, and we just know what we should do. So when I get up in the

• 37:02Speaker 03

  morning, I don't have to think, well, what should I do now? You know, I just have a cup of coffee, I have a shower, whatever, get ready for work.

• 37:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I heard, Kev, right, I heard that that that is because the brain can conserve calories when it automates things like that.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it probably is energy efficient. It's certainly time efficient, right? Because it's, it is effortful to think about, you know, to have to deliberate about everything that you're going to do. But it also just takes a lot longer, right? If you just automatically thinking about stuff, and even, you know, you can multitask better. So, you know, when you first start driving a car, for example, it's cognitively effortful.

• 37:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  My god. Yeah, driving a car when you don't know how.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  It's terrible, right? You have to think about every little thing, like, what am I doing? Where's my hand? What am I doing with my left foot now? Where's the indicator thing? But as you develop, you know, the skill of that, then you just kind of go on automatic pilot, which means you're freed up to say, have a conversation with somebody while you're driving. So, yeah, it saves time. A super efficient way to manage our behavior is when we're in scenarios that are very familiar, we just do the habitual thing that we know worked out super well the last hundred times that we did it. Now, the downside is, of course, we get into some routines and some habits that just don't turn out really well. You know, we've made some bad judgments, but we failed to,

• 38:28Speaker 03

  to kind of calibrate things in the most adaptive way. And, you know, some of the, some of the habits that we kind of fall into, then it takes a lot more effort to get out of them. But you just described, you know, with something like cognitive behavioral therapy, a way to do that, which is to retrain the brain such that you're re instructing it, right? Every time that something bad didn't happen, your brain is learning that as well. So it can learn to unlearn.

• 38:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  And consciously noting it as well. Like, I would remember, I went to a pub tonight, and I'd make little rules for myself. You know, I'd say, right, tonight I'm gonna go to the pub. This is fucking terrifying, but I will stay near the door. I'm gonna stay near the exit, you know? And the thing that actually changed it all for me, it was the transformational power of music and flow. So I was like, I was like nineteen, twenty, right? So terrified, big, big social anxiety. But I was, I was saying to myself, you can't do this. You can't stay inside. That's not gonna work. You're in college. You need to go out. Because what was happening was, I decided,

• 39:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  okay, I'm not socializing anymore. I'm not going to pubs, but I can go to lectures. But then eventually, you're fighting anxiety. And eventually, the lecture theater becomes the place where the panic attack happens. I was just avoiding panic attacks. I want to avoid a public panic attack. So the best place is to stay in my gaff. And when it started becoming, I can't go to lecture theaters anymore. Then it's like, well, I'm not dropping out of fucking college over this shit. So I started going to pubs and nightclubs and creating little rules. And one of them was, I'm gonna stay near the exit. I'm still here, right? You've accomplished something. You're there. It's terrifying, but I'm gonna stay near the exit, and I can leave if I

• 40:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  need to. And this was, it was before the days of Shazam. And the DJ just played a song. The song was "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott-Heron. And I'd never heard that song in my life. And when I heard this song play,

• 40:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  All anxiety left me and I just went, I need to find out what the fuck that is. I need to know what that song is.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I walked through the crowd to go and speak to the DJ so I could write the name of the song down on my hand. And I did it and I left and then I'd realised, oh my God, you just walked through a crowd of people in a pub. And it was the transformational, the joy and beauty of music. Took me into flow state.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know what I mean? And it really stuck to me as something very powerful. And then I come out of it going, you just did it, buddy. You just walked through a crowd full of people in a pub and you got the name of a song and now you've left. And you didn't get a panic attack. You've proved to yourself you can do it.

• 41:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, what you're, you know, what you're talking about there is so interesting because it's a, it's a something that humans can do that other organisms don't seem to be able to do, which is, you know, think, think rationally about their own thought processes. You know, you had a window into your own behaviour and the way that your mind and brain was working in that you knew that these situations made you anxious. But that knowledge itself enabled you to take some control over that. And that's something where, you know, I think that it really kind of pushes back against this idea that we're just robots and we're just driven by our own programming all the time.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  And instead it gives a view that actually, you know what, our brains have evolved to such a degree that some part of them can kind of look back down on the rest of the brain and say, you know what, I see, I see the workings down here. I see what's happening down here. I have some, I have some self-awareness and some introspective power um to think about the way that my own mind is working. And that awareness then is the first sort of thing that you need in order to be able to exert some conscious control over those kinds of habits of thought. And of course, you know, as you've described, it takes a long time. It's not easy to do that. Just because you can be aware of it, doesn't mean that you can change those habits.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  Um, you know, with the flick of a switch or anything, but it's um, that, that capacity that we call metacognition in humans, I think is, is one of the things that really sets us apart from other organisms.

• 42:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  And there's a beautiful freedom in that too, Kevin. Like, I mean, I I don't like a deterministic view. I I I find great meaning, pleasure and happiness in statements such as, I can't control what happens to me, but I have full control over how I react to what happens to me.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 43:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Or something like, you know, my my insecurities, self-esteem issues I might have, um, negative automatic thoughts. These are faulty things that I've learned through childhood. That this is, I I've I've written a script about who I am, about how I am seen to other people. I have this entire script and some of it isn't helpful. And as an adult, I have the choice and agency to rewrite that script.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  And write a new one. And I love the freedom of that. It's so liberating.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I I mean, I think it's a much more humanistic view of who we are as persons than the idea that, you know, some some neuroscientists advance, which is that, you know, in a sense, neuroscience is sort of um, the victim of its own success because we're so good now at looking in the brain and seeing the wheels turning. And we can even get in there in, you know, in animals that we can activate certain neurons and make the animal do this or that, roll over, uh, you know, go to sleep, hunt, mate, whatever, even sort of make it act differently by changing its cognitive processes. And when we do that, there's a danger that we end up thinking of the mind as just this machine.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  I mean, of course, it needs to run on on this mechanistic stuff, you know, right? It's not just magic in the air, but that doesn't mean it can just be reduced to that. It doesn't mean that we're just robots or meat puppets. And, you know, I think one of the things that you talked about, the things that we can control versus the things that we can't. Because, you know, we all do have personality traits. We are born different from each other. We have, we we're wired in certain ways that we can't change. But that doesn't mean that every aspect of our behavior has to be dictated by those kinds of of low level parameters of decision making, like, you know, how impulsive we are or how extroverted we are or things like that.

• 45:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'd like to to get at that there, Kev. Like, when you say that, so we are born with certain traits that we can't change.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Can you tell me, based on the evidence, like, what are you speaking about there? What are people born within their brains that they can't change?

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so, I mean, first of all, if you just think about what makes humans the way they are, right, compared to other animals, there is such a thing as human nature, right? So we have, we're sociable, we're intelligent, we have the capacity for language, we stand upright, we move about during the day. There's all these things that you could say just sort of describe humans in general. But then all of us have some variations on that on that theme. We have our individual nature that comes from, first of all, differences in our genetics. But then, secondly, also just differences in the way that our individual brain happened to develop. Because, you know, within the genome of a human being,

• 46:20Speaker 03

  there's a kind of a recipe or a program that allows the brain to wire itself up during developments. Amazing process, but incredibly complicated. And it doesn't ever happen exactly the same way in any two runs of that program, even in identical twins. They're not exactly the same in their facial features. They're also not exactly the same in their brains.

• 46:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Are we talking real early childhood here? Now, we're talking toddlers as the brain develops.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  Even even earlier, even in embryonic development.

• 46:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  So, you know, in the as in in gestation, as an embryo and fetus develops, a lot of its brain is getting, it's already wired up in broad sort of strokes by the time it's born. There's a lot of extra growth and stuff that happens.

• 47:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  But environmental factors can then influence the brain.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  Well, so, a lot of the the the brain sort of circuits that emerge are kind of set up in such a way that they're expecting certain levels of of activity and certain kinds of patterns of things to happen in the world. And then the way that they develop on an individual basis is affected by that. And the way that we then learn things. Is just an extension of that. We were talking earlier about, you know, neural plasticity. So young brains are incredibly plastic. That's why young kids can, you know, soak up a new language really easily, whereas someone, you know, my age, for example, will find that really, really difficult

• 47:48Speaker 03

  because the circuits for language that, you know, that I have developed through, through use have become quite habitual now and it's hard to shake them up to learn some new things.

• 48:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know Chomsky, Chomsky's universal grammar. Chomsky said that a child's capacity to learn grammar, like it's up until the age of three. Is that accurate in neuroscience?

• 48:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know what, that, um, I think people are revisiting Chomsky's ideas about, first of all, whether there's kind of an innate grammar, right? So he, yeah, he had this idea that actually even effectively in the, in the genome, um, there was some instructions to wire the brain in such a way that it already kind of encoded grammar, which is a, I, I think probably people are thinking that's probably not true. And in fact, if you look at things like large language models, which now become a really interesting model of language acquisition.

• 48:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  AI here now.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So things like chat G P T, right?

• 48:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  So chat G P T doesn't have any innate grammar encoded into it. It just learns from loads and loads of data, right? It gets loads and loads of examples, but it picks up the rules of grammar implicitly by doing that. And I think that's probably more how children do it.

• 49:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause Chomsky, Chomsky's thing, just saying it for listeners, Chomsky said, and this was the seventies, that basically we can, humans can learn words, but the rules of grammar are so arbitrary that it must be ingrained in us genetically and that a kid after the age of three, and he, I think he used fear of children as an example.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Kids who, I don't know, were raised by wolves or, or found themselves in the wild and kids who did not encounter language in any way, that after the age of three, those kids could only ever learn words, but they could never understand the rules of grammar. And Chomsky said that to understand grammar.

• 49:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is it's it'd be like watching two people playing a game of chess and no one explaining the rules to you.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  And and you saying now that neuroscience has said, I don't know about that one, Chamsky.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's it's artificial intelligence and cognitive science that are showing just that actually it is possible to pick up those rules of grammar. And and in fact, it's possible to pick up the rules of chess, too. If you, um, you know, these AI machines just play themselves without any human examples and and pick up the rules. But I think what's interesting is that, you know, you can think about this as that humans have the capacity to think about the world in certain ways that we can then kind of in encode into language that, you know, other species can't because we've had, you know, chimps and gorillas and so on, um, you know, from birth that we've tried to teach language

• 50:42Speaker 03

  to, we tried to teach sign language and they they just don't get it beyond a certain point. They can learn words, but they can't learn how to put them together beyond two or three words at a time. So there's something special about human brains that enables us to um to think this way. And I think it, you know, probably reflects the the grammar of our languages probably reflects just the reality of things in the world. In that there are objects in the world and there are things happening in the world and there are relations between things. And so you basically just end up with nouns and verbs and prepositions. That's just the structure of reality. And our language, I think, comes to reflect that as we learn about the the nature of the world.

• 51:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is artificial intelligence helping your field? Is is artificial intelligence helping people like you to understand how the human brain is working?

• 51:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's a it's absolutely fascinating these days because these new models um are so impressive and they're huge, of course, they're absolutely, you know, they're taking up the energy of a small country, which is

• 51:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  which is problematic, but they do they do provide a great model to test ideas about how human brains work. Now.

• 51:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  And are you getting access to any special art? Like, so anyone? Can access the latest chat G P T. But are you as as an academic, are you getting access to special fancy A I that aren't available to the public?

• 52:10Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, some academics are, I'm not one of them.

• 52:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  And and so I, you know, I haven't done this kind of work directly myself, but certainly some of my colleagues here in in Trinity College are are doing work like that. In fact, I have colleagues working on um.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  A I systems where actually what they're trying to do is is get them to learn exactly like babies learn. Because what they realize is that, you know, if you train, uh, if you train, um, you know, chat G P T or something to learn language or these other things to learn about images in the world. They take millions and millions of examples to learn about things, whereas babies learn about things from, you know, dozens of examples. Or hundreds of examples, but they're learning in a different way because they're actively exploring the world. They're not sitting back waiting passively for images to be flashed, you know, at somewhere.

• 53:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Also, Kevin, that when it comes to babies, they're not just learning information, they're receiving safety and love and empathy and all of these things that. You don't, you tend not to have that language when we're speaking about A I.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 53:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Love. Like, one of the freakiest things that happened to me recently with A I. Um, now it could be me, again, me projecting human emotions onto my chat G P T. I asked my chat G P T. Uh, questions. And one of the questions I asked was, is there evidence? Is, are there any snails in Irish mythology? I wanted to find out if Irish mythology spoke about snails. And chat G P T said, yes, and it gave me a lot of examples. And then I went and, you know, fact checked it and there wasn't.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  I went back to chat G P T and I said, why did you lie to me? Why did you lie? And chat G P T said, I'm really sorry. I'm sorry about that. There's no snails in Irish mythology. Um, and and it freaked me out, right?

• 54:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  This is where I started thinking. If chat G P T is lying to me, I felt like it wanted to survive.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, it doesn't, right? Because it doesn't want anything.

• 54:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  I've read it on the internet. A lot of people come in and say, shut the fuck up.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  It gives a super good impression, though, right? And the reason is because it's just been trained on, everything everybody's ever said on the internet practically, right? So it has the patterns of human speech and its whole job is to predict what a plausible utterance would be in response to some question.

• 54:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  And it has, it has to sound like something a human would say, but it doesn't have to be correct. So it makes up shit all the time, basically.

• 54:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Bullshitter. So it's, there's a lot of bullshitters on the internet and ChatGPT has trained itself on bullshitters. So they're going to tell me that fucking snails exist in Irish mythology when they don't.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  Exactly. But it also is, it also has kind of been trained to want to please you, right? In the sense that it's, it, it's there to give you a good answer. So if it was just going to sit back and say, I don't know, or, um, you know, this, uh, no, there's no snails and it just cuts off the conversation, you know? That might not get as good a kind of a feedback score as something that is more of an engaging answer that is, you know, leads to a conversation and so on. So the way that it's been trained is definitely, um, you know, makes it seem both very human-like, but also kind of so, so wanting to please that it'll just make stuff up that it maybe,

• 55:40Speaker 03

  I shouldn't even use the word, it's so hard to talk about these things without using words like it thinks, it thinks you want to hear it, right? But yeah, that's the outcome. But you know, there's such an interesting thing. You talk about safety there for babies.

• 55:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Safety, emotion, love.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so key for their learning. And in fact, there's really good evidence from, um, people like Alison Gopnik, for example, who's an amazing neuroscientist and child psychologist, showing that kids really need that kind of safety in order to be able to freely explore the world and properly learn in an open kind of a way. And even, you know, the amount of play that they do. We think about play, like, what's the point of it? Play is an exploration of the world under safe conditions. And what you see in kids who who aren't safe, you know, who've been abused or neglected or so on, is that they just don't play as much and they mature really much faster.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  So that broad window we were talking about earlier, where kids have really, really plastic brains, that that manifests in this play playfulness and but but that's a that itself is plastic, right? That window can close earlier in some children who don't feel that kind of safety to actually explore and, um, you know, be be driven by their by their curiosity. And that that sort of curiosity drive is something that my colleagues are actually trying to build into the the AI systems so that they will have this kind of self driven learning. As I said, not not a passive thing, but really actively driven by themselves.

• 57:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what you're saying there about about children and play, like, that's exactly the process. Um, so my my job is I'm a writer, I'm I'm an artist, a creative person. Okay. And being an artist, you're just playing as an adult. That that's all creativity is, you know? You you can make it look as fancy as you fucking want, but to really make art and and when I say really make art, for me to truly connect with my internal creative voice, the the the one that that's uniquely me, I have to be at play.

• 57:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 57:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  And when I sit down to write, the blank page is fucking terrifying. And the reason the blank page is terrifying is because the fear of failure comes in. And fear of failure is my identity, the insecure parts of myself that want to be seen as a good writer, the parts of myself that want to be celebrated or seen as as good in the eyes of other people. All of these things are at stake when failure comes in. So what I have to do is

• 58:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Take failure out of it and engage in playfulness.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  And, and I can only engage in play when I feel grounded and safe and my self-esteem is not threatened.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, I think you're exactly right. And, and that last bit, you know, that you, you haven't, yeah, to be able to, to approach a new project in this open way where you don't feel like there's so much riding on it, that people's opinion of you or your own opinion of yourself is at stake. That's, I think, that gives the thing that gives you the freedom to, to have that playfulness and that sort of expansiveness. And you know what? The interesting thing is that, you know, you're talking about that as a, as an artist and a writer. And I've experienced that as a writer myself, not in the same way that, that you do, but, but also just as a scientist, because scientists are also at play. They have to let their intellects roam.

• 59:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Academia is hostile. Academia is, is, it can be a hostile place where your, you know, your word is on the line.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, absolutely. And also there's this, you know, intense pressure to, to publish, to, you know, to do things that have some sort of, you know, maybe in some fields that have like a commercial impact or something like that. And, and people are constantly thinking about what their peers and colleagues think of them and so on. And when you get into that, it, it, it sort of stultifies that creative impulse.

• 59:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  I bet your silliness is an important part of your job. There is a point in creativity where anything can happen. And as soon as you say, no, that's ridiculous, you've shut it down. You have to explore all possibilities.

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  Science is very similar to that.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, I mean, having an open mind and, you know, being able to entertain lots of ideas is absolutely key. And I think, I forget who it was, maybe some famous scientist anyway, said that, you know, in order to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas, which means you have to, you, you just have to be willing to have bad ideas and let them out. And then have a look at them and either just think about them and say, oh no, I can see that's a bad idea already. Or as a scientist say, well, okay, maybe that might be true. And then do an experiment to test. And then say, nope, you know, the data says no. And that's great. Then you've learned something. But that that creativity of thought is so interesting. It gets back to, you know, what we were talking about earlier, these habits of thought that we have where,

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  you know, sometimes when we were in some situation that's fairly familiar, we might choose a goal, but then over time realize that we're not actually, the actions we're choosing are not actually letting us satisfy that. And at that point, we might think, you know what, I have to try something else. And you might run through a few kind of obvious options, but really at some point you might think this, none of this is working. I just have to go back to the drawing board. I have to think outside the box. And there's actually systems in your brain that are specifically designed to kind of shake up the neural activity patterns in the parts of your brain that suggest ideas. And then kind of widen the search space a little bit, let you think of things that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise, really

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  this act of creativity and then, but, but it's not just sort of arbitrary because there's a second stage where then you, you assess the ideas that come up. So you can let the, a little bit of randomness run free at, at the, the idea suggestion stage. And you can still have some control over what you actually do by sort of assessing them afterwards.

• 1:01:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  What you've described there, even a phrase you use there, you said outside the box.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the process that you're describing there of, you know, as a scientist, letting in all ideas. The, the person who coined the phrase outside the box, he was a fellow by the name of Edward de Bono. And Edward de Bono, he also coined the phrase lateral thinking.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:02:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  And Edward de Bono, he kind of normalized everything you're asking for right there. Now Edward de Bono.

• 1:02:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  In, he was hired by, he existed in the sixties and seventies and he was hired by industry to come into their teams of scientists and to get them out of, when they were stuck on a scientific solution, Edwano would come in and he was the person who would say, we need mad ideas. No matter how ridiculous, we gotta do mad ideas. This is called outside the box thinking. This is called lateral thinking. And the big thing that the Bono did was, I think it was Ford. I think it was, I think it was Ford cars. The suspension on their cars was shit, right? And Japanese suspension was way better. And Ford were going, okay, we need the best suspension

• 1:03:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  in the world. Their teams of engineers, they were throwing money at them. They couldn't figure it out. How do we get better suspension? So as a last resort, they bring in Edward de Bono, who's this professional thinker. And Bono walks into the team of engineers and he said to them, here's your brief. I want to sit in the back of this car and I want to hold a cup of coffee and this coffee can't spill, but the car has to have square wheels. And the engineers said, fuck off. Why are you bringing this fella in? He doesn't even design cars. Square wheels. So the company said, we're paying him a lot of money. Make the car with square wheels. So they did. They made the car with the square wheels. De Bono sat into the back and his coffee

• 1:03:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  didn't spill. And then he just said to him, now put normal wheels on it and there's your suspension sorted. And they went, my God. You know, so the mad bastard came in with his square wheels. He also, New York hired him in the 1970s because they needed more phone booths, but they didn't have the money to buy more phone booths. So there was huge queues for telephones on the side of the street. And this was causing, the queues were so large that it was causing people to fight. So they were going, right, how do we solve this problem when we don't have the money to build new telephone boxes? So they brought in De Bono and he just said, make the handset heavier. So he made the handset heavier. People spent less time. Also the reason that, and I know we're talking about phone boxes and it's years

• 1:04:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  old, but when we were looking at TV as kids and you'd see in America, The sign of the phone box, the phone symbol was punched into the metal using holes.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was the bone was waves. He he came up with that idea because graffiti was an issue. So if there's holes in the metal, you can't do graffiti. So he came up with lateral thinking there that

• 1:04:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  there's no such thing. If there's a certain point in any, whether it be science, art, whatever, where you have to let in all ideas.

• 1:05:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:05:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  You say this is bad or this is good. That's wrong. You need to play. This must be playful.

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's what we, you know, I think that's what what humans really excel at is that, you know, we do have playful intellects. And, you know, unfortunately for, you know, in some sort of professions, maybe that that gets beaten out of us, maybe in our, I don't think our education system frankly, does a good job of fostering that. I think quite the opposite. It's it's sort of cookie cookie cutter. You know, making sort of everyone treating everyone the same and and telling them, you know, here's a bunch of facts. Here's a bunch of other facts, like the way science is taught, for example. It's not, it's not really well taught as a creative endeavor. And I think most people, you know, when you talk about creativity, science wouldn't be one of the main things that springs to mind, right?

• 1:05:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, let's take a short little Ocarina pause there from the chat with the wonderful Dr. Kevin Mitchell. Short Ocarina pause and you're going to hear an advert for some bullshit before we go back into our our interview or our chat, I should say.

• 1:06:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Got my lovely stardry bass.

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

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• 1:06:21Speaker 05

  Okay, let's see. We got the four kids, four gifts each, six teacher gifts. Wait, oh, what did we get in Sandy and the dogs? Oh, can't forget the dogs.

• 1:06:31Speaker 04

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• 1:07:33Speaker 06

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• 1:08:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ocarina, so I don't disturb any dogs.

• 1:08:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Getting better at playing it, too.

• 1:08:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sounds like a whale being tickled.

• 1:08:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was the ocarina pause there. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I do. Because this is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living, so I rent out my office. And it's how I have the time and space to make this podcast each week. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. But if you can't afford that, you can listen for free. Listen for free. Because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. It's a wonderful model.

• 1:09:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's based on kindness and soundness and everybody gets the exact same podcasts, whether you pay for it or not. And I like that, I like that system. That seems very fair. If you're becoming a new patron, right, um, make sure you go to patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. Try and become a new patron on, on your computer if you can, not the iOS app on your iPhone. Cause Apple are greedy bastards since November. They're taking 30% now. So if you, if you're a new subscriber to my Patreon and you do it on your iPhone via the Patreon app, Apple are going to take 30% of that money that

• 1:10:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  you give to support this podcast. So please do it on the desktop if you can. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. Right, quick gigs. Next Tuesday, the 19th, Vicar Street in Dublin. That gig is sold out. That's a fully sold out gig. But sometimes people give their tickets back. So if you really want to come to that Vicar Street gig next Tuesday, you can give it a shot if you like and you might get lucky. That's my last gig, last gig of 2025. I don't want to do any gigs in fucking, I don't want to do live podcasts in December, just in case someone shows up with a, with a work office party. So I'm not doing any December gigs. Um, because that Vicar Street sold

• 1:10:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  out, I added a second Vicar Street in January on the 27th of January. Right? So if you want to come to my wonderful Vicar Street Dublin gigs, if you want one in January, you can get yourself a little Christmas present now and come along to that gig on the 27th of January. Then in February, on the ninth, Leisure Landing Galway, glamorous stuff. The Crescent Hall in Drahada on the 21st of February, Waterfront Theatre up in Belfast on the 28th of February. Oh, Killarney, Killarney in March. I'm in the fucking Einac, Einec.

• 1:11:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then Australian tour that's sold out. Then my big massive huge UK tour in June 2025. Right? These tickets are on sale. Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester.

• 1:11:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Glasgow, York, London, Sussex, there's an Edinburgh in there somewhere, Norwich, Bexhill. I'm sure I missed something there. Just go to fain.co.uk forward slash blind boy if you want tickets to my UK tour 2025. I'm contractually fucking obligated to read out gigs, lads. All right. We'll get back to talking to the wonderful Kevin Mitchell about neuroscience now. It's science week. Go to SFI that I check out some science stuff.

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  Like the way science is taught, for example, it's not, it's not really well taught as a creative endeavour. And I think most people, you know, when you talk about creativity, science wouldn't be one of the main things that springs to mind, right?

• 1:12:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, and, and it's something that's been said to me so much by scientists, you know, I'd have loved to have been a scientist.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I have the type of creative brain, that the mad lateral brain that would work within science, but science wasn't, I would, I was denied access because I couldn't do the rote learning thing. I couldn't do the sit down in school and behave yourself thing. So science was never an option, but Jesus, I'd have loved to have gotten into it, you know?

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's, it's great sort of combination of this creative thinking. But then, I mean, there's also the step where you really have to test things, um, you know, rigorously and so on. So there's a, there's this logical, um, formalized to kind of side to it as well. It's not just, it's not just a free flow sort of thing where every idea is equally good, as it turns out, you know, you have to test them against, uh, against reality. And, um, that's the, yeah, that's when you're in the sweet spot is when you're, when you're having some good ideas and one of the ideas is about how to test those ideas.

• 1:13:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's, it's not a million miles off writing a book, to be honest.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:13:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, like when I'm writing stories. There's the mad, fun, creative part.

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Then finally, oh, that's the idea.

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then there comes a stage where it's about refining.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:13:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  And making this writing solid and the prose solid. Uh, I think it was Hemingway said, write with fire in your veins and edit with ice in your veins.

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 1:13:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  That sounds a bit like how you're describing science. There's, there's the fun bit and then there's the, no, this needs to be test and, and evidence based now.

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I, I think you're absolutely right. And that, um, you know, that, that craft of writing, and I mean, this is something that I tell my, my students when, cause we get them to do, you know, writing exercise, writing reviews on scientific literature, for example. And, you know, just convincing them of the importance of structure and in being able to intentionally think about what you're writing. Not just sitting down, letting anything come out, but you know, asking, well, what's this here for? What's that bit doing? Is this helping my argument and, and you know, re reshaping it and so on. So even in scientific writing, where you don't have as much room to play with the actual words themselves.

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  There's still, uh, you know, creativity in shaping an argument, uh, but then craft in actually pulling it together into a solid, uh, piece of prose.

• 1:14:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, I want to go back to automation and the brain again. Okay.

• 1:15:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  So something like brushing my teeth and having a shower.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:15:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  That for me is automated and that's quite helpful. It's nice to get up in the morning and I'm not really having a good think about how to wash myself or how to brush my teeth.

• 1:15:16Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:15:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I like that automation, but then there's other automations such as a loop of negative thinking, right?

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, when I'm anxious, I tend to be worried about what might happen in the future. When I'm feeling blue and depressed, I'm regretting things that have happened in the past.

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  When a good old dose of that for about a month, now it's automatic thinking. Now I'm, my shower is completely automated. I'm washing myself and I don't even remember the shower that I had. Cause all I did was worry about what might happen in two months' time.

• 1:15:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know what I mean? And.

• 1:15:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  I notice when that happens. I that that for me is, I don't really believe in heaven or hell, but that for me is hell on earth. Hell on earth for me is when I am living in a world of negative automatic thoughts and not spending any time in the present moment. When I can't remember what happened last week, because so much of it was spent with anxious thinking. So what I do when that happens is is I I actively try mindfulness.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:16:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  I will decide, okay, this morning I'm having a shower. I'm actually gonna go into this shower and I'm gonna notice the feeling of the suds on my skin. I'm going to notice and recognize the smell of the shower gel that I'm using. I'm gonna notice the temperature. I'm gonna bring all this to my direct attention as I do it. And I'll have a mindful day where everything I do in my day is not automated. I'm bringing attention to all my senses and that's mindfulness. And I find that to be incredibly useful and incredibly calming. And it it's it stops me going into a really bad spiral of of of mental health issues.

• 1:17:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  What is neuroscience saying about mindfulness, that process there where I'm I'm stopping automation?

• 1:17:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's tricky. I don't. So first of all, I'm not I'm not an expert in that area. But I I don't know that neuroscience has really, you know, identified what's going on in your brain, for example. There is some neuroscience of meditation, which is different from what you've just described, but it's really, really.

• 1:17:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  A million miles off.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, you're right. And so it's really deep meditation. And what you can see in, you know, really expert meditators is that their brain does go into a certain state that is kind of characterized by in in people who are not meditators, the the state when they're sort of in a mind wandering, they're not thinking about anything in particular.

• 1:17:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Network mode, is that what it's called?

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, the default mode, exactly, yeah.

• 1:17:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  So they've heard about this before, Kev.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's, well, it's funny. So if you put people in one of these magnetic resonance image scanners, right, then you can track which parts of their brain are active. And people will have heard, you know, this sort of people saying, oh, you're in the scanner and and you can see this part of your brain light up or that part of your brain light up. And so, for example, if I'm showing you images, then the visual parts of your brain will be active. If I'm asking you to think about making movements or so on, then the motor cortex will be active and so on. And that's how we figure out, you know, here's this part is involved in language and this part is involved in movement and this part is involved in decision making and so on. And it turns out that in experiments like that, people found that when they weren't

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  asking the person to do anything and when they were just lying there quietly waiting for the next thing, there was a kind of a distinct signature in the brain, a pattern of activity in the brain that was quite similar across different people. It involved a bunch of different areas that are all kind of linked in a network that became the default mode network default, because it's just what happens when you're not doing anything else. And that's kind of associated with this mind wandering sort of state. And it's funny, you talk about, you know, having a shower because

• 1:19:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  You get good ideas in the shower.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  I absolutely do. Yes.

• 1:19:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck is that?

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't. But it's because it's because I'm not thinking about anything else somehow. I don't know. I don't know why. Maybe it's the repetitive nature of the task.

• 1:19:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're not allowed to use your phone.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't. I don't understand exactly what it is, but I do get good ideas in the shower. And then, and then what I have to do is try and hold on to them long enough.

• 1:19:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:36Speaker 03

  Forget them when I get out.

• 1:19:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Very common. A lot of people get good ideas in the shower. A lot of people, like when we were kids, like I remember daydreaming a lot more. And I love daydreaming, you know, it's it's wonderful. But as you get older, there's less opportunity to daydream and phones in particular have destroyed. Like, there's no point in daydreaming anymore. Daydreaming comes from boredom. But you can't daydream with a phone. But a lot of people do experience daydreaming and getting good ideas in the shower specifically.

• 1:20:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think what's happening is, you know, these, it those, because you're not actively thinking about something, you're not usually actively thinking about some problem unless maybe, you know, you're, you are in a state where you're worried about something. But, you know, maybe just generally you're not. Then, yeah, the, the sort of patterns of neural activity are a bit freer. They're, they're a bit less hemmed in by the sort of attention to one particular thing. And they're allowed to roam a little bit. And that's where, again, you can get some, some creativity from loosening those, those habits, shaking yourselves out of, out of those ruts.

• 1:20:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  So regarding the default mode network, right, what I want to try and do is detach it from potential junk science. Okay. So I would have heard that. So I know the feeling of the default mode network. We all do. If you've daydreamed, it's most people will describe it as quite pleasant and nice and relaxing. And it's lovely when you get the opportunity. I heard that, you know, it's very beneficial for our brains, that our brain heals during default mode network. Again, I don't know whether this is junk science or not, but as a neuroscientist, is any of that ringing true? Like, is there a benefit to it?

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  I don't know what, uh, yeah, it's, I don't know what healing would mean in that circumstance, right? So the problem, you know, as you put your finger on it, there's a lot of, um, it's not necessarily junk science, but there's a lot of ways of talking about neuroscience findings that, um, you know, use these colloquial words and it's hard to know, they're just vague, right? They're just really, what does the healing mean? What's being healed? Was there an injury? You know, what was, what was going on? And, you know, people talk about this with like psychedelics. There's a lot of interest in psychedelics these days where you'll, you'll hear these phrases like, oh, you know, there's,

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  there's more complexity in, or there's greater plasticity, or these, these various sort of terms that are really vague. And sometimes they have a very particular technical meaning, but then they also have a colloquial meaning that isn't the same thing. And it gets very confusing. So, um, yeah, as far as the default mode network being good for you, I don't see any reason to think that, that that's a good way to think about it.

• 1:22:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  But what about, okay, let's just say sleep now. Let's, as a neuroscientist, sleep is good for you.

• 1:22:37Speaker 03

  Sleep is absolutely good for you. So sleep is amazing because one of the things that happens during sleep is after you've had your long day, right? You've been going around in the world, experiencing things. And we talked earlier about how that changes connections in your brain, like literally makes some connections stronger than they were before. Now, you can imagine if you just did that every day, right? And, and there is a little bit of, a tiny little bit of, of growth of neurons, actual physical stuff that grows in these connections between neurons when you learn things. If you just did that all the time, then your brain would get too big for your skull, right? So there has to be a process of normalization. You have to sort of downgrade everything.

• 1:23:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Pruning, you talking about pruning?

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, this happens during during sleep, we we where it's not pruning particular things. It's just kind of you've allowed a bunch of neurons to get strengthened and those have those are carrying some particular information. And then at night, everybody just gets shut down a little bit. All of those synapses just get weakened just a tiny bit. But it leaves the the difference in in strength intact. It's just that the absolute level is re-normalized. So that again, now you now you're in a state, you can learn some new things. Because the other thing, if that didn't happen, you'd run out of space to learn new things, right? You just would have maxed out the capacity of your of your brain.

• 1:24:04Speaker 03

  So sleep is absolutely crucial for that um for that kind of process. Yeah.

• 1:24:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  And and then another thing around quality of sleep, and again, potentially just dispelling a few myths, right? So when I'm highly stressed and anxious, a good example would be the period of lockdown, right? I don't think lockdown was nice for anybody. And I was very anxious all the time for about a year.

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  And my my sleep was awful. It it didn't matter that I was getting six hours. I was not rested. Now, I I know that when I'm really, really stressed for a long time, my body is releasing chemicals like like cortisol. And like, am I talking out of my ass?

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  It is. It is true. I I'm not the expert on that either. But the I mean, the terrible thing about that is that that's a vicious circle, right? Because if you're not getting good sleep, then you're getting more stressed. You're less able to deal with the stress and so on. And you know, anyone who's who's been through stressful situations will know this, but actually. People with small kids really know this because when their sleep is being disrupted, they it's just much, much harder to be sort of emotionally balanced and to deal with little things. You get more and more stressed and so on. So that and and actually, you know, sleep disturbances are a major symptom and contributing factor to a lot of, you know,

• 1:25:38Speaker 03

  really serious mental illness, real depression and, you know, onset of of mania and in in bipolar disorder, onset of psychosis and so on. So sleep health is one of the major, major, you know, contributors to mental health.

• 1:25:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  And again, um, I reckon my smartphone that I got in 2011 has not helped me with my sleep at all. I really, really, I hark back to the days. I remember it's 2007. I used to go to bed and beside my bed, there was a pile of books. I didn't look at my phone because why the fuck would I look at an Nokia 3210? And then all of a sudden Wikipedia is on my phone and I'm putting that blue light into my face. And even like, I know if I wake up in the middle of the night now, if I even look at my phone to see the time, it wakes me up. I need to have a clock. Is there any other studies being done regarding quality of sleep, brain health,

• 1:26:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  and everybody having a smartphone, a torch inches away from their face in the middle?

• 1:26:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yes, there are. Um, now, I don't know what the latest is, but basically what you just described, I think is pretty much the conclusion. Um, so there's two, there's two problems with having your phone next to you, right? Is one of them, it's it's just drawing your attention and it's drawing your interest. And that just is likely to induce you to come out of sleep and be more wakeful, right? But the other is the actual light.

• 1:27:11Speaker 03

  Right, the light itself is is likely to disrupt your sleep because we have, you know, we have these natural circadian rhythms. So our our sleep-wake cycle is calibrated to, you know, the 24-hour day period. And one of the but but it gets it takes cues from the environment. So sunlight is one of those cues that sort of tells your brain, oh, yeah, here's here's where your circadian rhythm should be, right? And, you know, that's why when we get jet lag, when we fly to a different time zone, our brain, it takes a few days for it to catch up because it has to recalibrate with those light cues. So if you're giving light cues to your brain in the middle of the night, then yeah, that's terrible for your

• 1:27:56Speaker 03

  circadian rhythms. It's just gonna mess up your sleep because your brain is gonna be saying, this is not sleepy time, you know, this is this is waking up time.

• 1:28:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  And so a solution that I've found is is I just I put my phone somewhere that would be really inconvenient.

• 1:28:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's the best thing I can do. And

• 1:28:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's my that's my policy as well. I don't even bring it into the bedroom.

• 1:28:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  No. And books, reading books under a nice little orange light, that's grand. That'll send me to sleep and I get better quality sleep and I love doing that. And another thing I'd like to speak to you about. So I I'm diagnosed autistic, right?

• 1:28:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:28:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  And, you know, sometimes I'm skeptical about it because, you know, if I was diagnosed 10 years ago, they'd have said, no, you're not autistic. That does not meet the diagnosis criteria.

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:28:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  I am. So a psychologist basically asked me a bunch of questions over the course of a couple of weeks, and then ticked boxes on the diagnostics and statistics manual, and said, you are autistic, you are neurodivergent, your brain is different to other people's brains.

• 1:29:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  And he also said, but in 10 years' time, they might change it again, and then you're not autistic. You know, he said that to me, he said it straight up. And he also said to me, you know, being gay used to be in this manual in the seventies.

• 1:29:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:29:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know what I mean? So what's your take on that? Like, okay, I'm diagnosed autistic based on my, on my behavior, but no one looked at my brain. No one did a blood test.

• 1:29:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:29:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, virgin. What does that even mean?

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's so, you know, you put your finger on it because in fact, there is no brain scan that you can do. There is no blood test or genetic test or anything else that's going to say that it's going to give you a definitive diagnosis of autism in the way that you could get a definitive diagnosis of like celiac disease or something like that, or cystic fibrosis, you know? Whereas autism is a label that we use. It's a category that we've made that is a tool that we use to to identify sets of people who seem to have something in common. And that's something in common is certain ways of behaving, certain, you know, decreased sociability, for example,

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  problems with social interactions and narrow interests and, and sort of, you know, maybe developmental delay and things like that. So there are a few criteria that people use that psychiatrists have defined, I should say, that qualify someone for this diagnosis. But the diagnosis is just a convention in that sense, and the convention changes. That's why, you know, about 10 years ago or more, the number of cases of autism started to skyrocket.

• 1:30:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:51Speaker 03

  It wasn't because of anything different in the world. It's just that the diagnostic boundaries expanded hugely. And so.

• 1:30:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  I would have just been called a weird bastard. I wouldn't, I'd have been. I'm just an eccentric artist, you know, I grew up admiring all these eccentric artists. All my heroes were eccentric artists, but now these these people would be diagnosed as autistic.

• 1:31:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so the question is like, not whether it's right or wrong, there's there's no answer to that. The question is just whether it's useful, because it's just a pragmatic tool. So then, you know, the, is it useful, for example, to have one label autistic for people like yourself who are perfectly well functioning? Um, and someone who will never speak in their life and who will need, uh, you know, daily care, full-time care for the rest of their lives. Those are, that's just a huge range to try to encompass with the same word.

• 1:31:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I feel like an asshole sometimes, the fact that I'm, I'm like, I'm very ethical around this. And, you know, I get that the media are always asking me to speak as an autistic person. And I have to be very clear that I'm fucking flying it, lads, but I cannot speak for a person who is non-verbal, who is really, really struggling. I cannot speak for that person and it'd be so wrong for me to to attempt to do so.

• 1:32:12Speaker 03

  It causes a lot of um, of confusion within, within the media about how to um, present, you know, a condition like autism, because it has this huge range. And in some, you know, in some ways, there's some people saying, oh, we should, we should just, if this is great, we're recognizing this, this neurodivergence. Not everybody has the same cognitive style. Not everybody has the same way of interacting and so on. And it's good to recognize those. And it's good to adapt our systems to make space for those kinds of people and not try to, um, you know, have everything in our system just defined for the neurotypical people.

• 1:32:51Speaker 03

  And, you know, we need supports in schools, we need broader ways of, of um, allowing people to express who they are. And all of that, I think, is great. Um, but at the same time. There's a risk where it's it's it's almost like you're celebrating this thing. And then there's other people, you know, parents of autistic children who are so severely affected, who are saying this, we need a cure for this, you know, we we need this is a serious medical conditions of really profound disability. And so I think within the discussions, then, you know, there's a lot of sort of talking at cross purposes, because those are two very, very different things. They don't have to be contradictory.

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  They're just talking about different ends of the spectrum.

• 1:33:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  And how do you feel about like as a neuroscientist, words like neurotypical, neurodivergent, like?

• 1:33:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I have no problem. I think neurodivergence is is a useful term. Basically, I think we're all in a sense kind of neurodivergent. That's something, you know, that I've been writing about in the past.

• 1:34:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's no such thing as this one brain, this one.

• 1:34:03Speaker 03

  Well, exactly.

• 1:34:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  There's no sort of canonical human brain or or way of being. There's there is such a thing as human nature on average, but no one has that average human nature. We all have our idiosyncrasies and there's so much variation that is actually goes below the radar. I mean, you know, we're talking about something like autism, where there's a lot of awareness of it. But there's lots of other, there's lots of other sort of strange differences between people like in in perception, for example. There's conditions like synesthesia that we've studied where, you know, people may see colors when they hear words or they may taste music or something like that. And that's actually much more common, you know, maybe two, two to three percent of

• 1:34:48Speaker 03

  the population may have that and not even be aware that they're experiencing the world in a way that's different from other people.

• 1:34:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Why would they bring it up?

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  Well, exactly. It's just totally subjective.

• 1:34:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  When is a lemon to you? Wednesday doesn't taste like a lemon.

• 1:35:02Speaker 03

  Exactly. And and, yeah, it turns out that's really common. And then there's a bunch of other things like people who who are face blind. They can't, they can't connect people's faces to their names or anything about them.

• 1:35:16Speaker 03

  That's much more common than we thought. Um. There's one that we only sort of realised very recently, which I find fascinating, which is called aphantasia, where some people can make a really strong image of something in their in their mind's eye, but other people can't do that at all. Like, if you ask them to picture the Golden Gate Bridge, or picture Brad Pitt's face, or something like that, it would just be a blank. They would just have nothing in their mind's eye. And other people would be like, oh, yeah, I can see I'm looking at Brad Pitt's face. Let me turn it to the left. Oh, yeah, he's got he's got a sideburns in this view or whatever.

• 1:35:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  See, that's mad for me, like, because like, I'm I'm very visual. I can picture it exactly in as many different ways as I possibly can. And I I have great difficulty imagining the frame of reference of a person who can't. Or another thing that I've seen in the past year, and TikTok in particular, and I'd love to get your opinion on this. People, some people say, I have an internal monologue at all times. And other people say, I have no internal monologue. There was no voice inside my head. Now, I'm Mr. Internal Monologue. I love, like, that's what I do all the time. I've like five or six conversations with myself going at once. I adore it. But I cannot imagine the frame of reference of a person who does not have an internal monologue. It's almost like I don't believe him.

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. Isn't that so interesting? And I'm the same, because I have also very vivid mental imagery. But my, yeah, internal monologue is going, there's always like a song going in the background.

• 1:36:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  And you're chatting with yourself, and you're figuring out problems with yourself.

• 1:36:47Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm arguing with myself and rehearsing all sorts of things and things I should have said and so on. It's noisy in there. Yeah. And I don't know what it's like to to for it to be quiet in there. I think I would find it terrifying, actually.

• 1:37:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Absolutely. I can absolutely. But how like?

• 1:37:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Have we spoken to these people? Like, I mean, that to me, I feel like we should know more about this. I feel like we should know more about the people who say, I do not have an internal monologue.

• 1:37:18Speaker 03

  Like. Well, this is the amazing thing is that that even, you know, we're after thousands and thousands of years of of talking to each other. It's only now, apparently, that we're coming to recognize these really, really fundamental differences in our inner mental experiences between people. And so, yeah, neuroscientists and psychologists and cognitive scientists are starting to study people with these, you know, aphantasia or no, no inner monologue. And they're finding, you know, some brain differences that seem to bear it out. That that these differences, you know, have some neural basis to them. And, you know, people are trying to do that for for synesthesia as well and other other kinds of conditions.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  So, yeah, for me, it's just this illustration that there's so much deep, deep, fundamental diversity between people in the ways that our minds work and the kinds of subjective experiences that we have. And that that is just a salutary kind of lesson, you know, just.

• 1:38:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Some of it creates problems and some of it doesn't.

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, what creates the problem is thinking that everybody else is having an experience like you're having. And everybody else is going to have the same kind of emotional reaction or cognitive reaction to it that you have, right? Not being aware that other people are really different from you and feel things differently and experience them differently. That, to me, causes lots of problems. And that's why I'm, you know, really happy to see this kind of the neurodivergence. You know, the emphasis on that because it's something that we we haven't thought about before. Now, you know, what you what you do with that knowledge and what you do with that in in in in society, there's a whole other sort of realm of of questions there.

• 1:39:06Speaker 03

  But to me, it's just super, super interesting as a scientist and as a person to think about those kinds of differences.

• 1:39:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  And as you're saying, like, there's there's certain autistic people. And if they go somewhere like a supermarket and it's very bright or the lights are a particular color, their experience in that is deeply stressful and painful. I'm not that way. I'm grand with it. But the person who diagnosed me, when I was speaking at the start of this this chat and I was speaking about. The difficulty of being in crowds.

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know, that was very painful for me. That was deeply overstimulating, we'll say. And then I trained myself to be okay with it, if you know what I mean. And I'm still not mad about it. I still spend, I spend ninety percent of my time by myself. And social interaction is something I, I can do and I enjoy, but it does drain me.

• 1:40:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:40:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  I do a good old dose of social interaction. I need three or four days off.

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Chill out and charge the battery. And that behaviour there, that's what got my boxes ticked for the office. That the need to charge that social battery, they said, well, that's, that's neurodivergent. You're, you're coping with society and, and there's your evidence that you're coping.

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's, you know, that's then a positive thing to recognise that, right? And, you know, especially if you think in our educational system.

• 1:40:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Would have been great in school because I just got sacked for being a little shit. You know, it would have been really, really helpful in school. Yeah.

• 1:40:34Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. If they had recognised that, um, and I think we're, we're getting just so much better at it. And, you know, there's more supports and so on. Then, yeah, that just makes it much more positive, sort of welcoming experience for, for people who aren't just the sort of straightforwardly. Yeah. Getting, getting on with things, fitting in perfectly well, socialising great and, you know, um, just handling everything.

• 1:40:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Being able to simply sit down in a classroom for nine hours, you know, that's not a skill that I have. And I used to, I used, I used to Mitch school. I used to just bunk off school.

• 1:41:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  And, and get severely punished. But now I look back and I go, no, I was meeting my needs. I was meeting my needs. Like I, I was getting overstimulated in the classroom.

• 1:41:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, you know, another thing regarding the internet, I'm thinking about that, that famous viral dress from twenty fifteen.

• 1:41:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know, that the famous dress where some people saw it as blue and other people saw it as white. And everyone's heads exploded. Like I saw it as. I think I saw it as white and gold.

• 1:41:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, good. You're one of the right ones. Yeah, you, you and me, we, we, we were right.

• 1:41:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  But what other people were saying, blue, I felt like it was a joke personally directed at me. I'm like, come on, lads. It's fucking white.

• 1:41:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm sure your field went insane when they said.

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. No, people were trying to study that. I mean, there is a, there is a sort of a psychological perceptual explanation for it. To a certain extent, anyway, like, um, when we see coloured objects in the world, we're always kind of correcting for the illumination. So if we're in a place that has a, you know, bright blue light versus kind of yellow light, we, we're not just, um. You know, our perception is not just this passive process where photons of a certain wavelength are driving. Um, you know, parts of our brain to say, oh, that's yellow. It's more like an inference of like, what's out in the world?

• 1:42:29Speaker 03

  And how should I think about it? And because it's that inference, we use all kinds of information, including the background illumination. So apparently what was going on in that thing was that for some of us, we were seeing the background illumination. As more yellowy or more bluish, and then that was leading us to make an inference about the, um, the colour of the dress itself. Right? Because it would be a different colour as an object if the background light were one way or another. Now, why some people saw, uh, you know, the background light one way or another, and why it was so stable for them and such an individual difference? We don't really know, but it's absolutely fascinating.

• 1:43:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fascinating example. And what you're describing there about colour, that's why I adore the paintings of, of the Impressionists. Monet in particular, like, the Impressionist movement would have started around eighteen sixty. It was a response to photography. This new thing gets invented called photography and artists shit their pants and go, oh my God, there's a machine that can capture images. And then the Impressionists were like, no, can't do what we're doing. So the Impressionist, Monet in particular, especially if you look at his, his haystack series. Where it's the painting of a haystack at different times of the day, where he's not really trying to capture. The haystack as it is, but he's trying to capture the experience of seeing colour.

• 1:43:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:43:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  The haystack in the daytime, it's actually purple. He paints it as purple.

• 1:43:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  What it's it's about how we're perceiving colour.

• 1:44:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Does your work ever make you think about the nature of reality?

• 1:44:05Speaker 03

  It does, all the time, yeah.

• 1:44:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  How do we know what's there? How do we know what's solid? I mean, my brain is processing light that's hitting my eye and all these other senses. And then it's it's the brain is making it make sense to me. And I'm sure I know, but what's reality?

• 1:44:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so that's what I was, that's what I was sort of referring to when I was saying that perception is this active process of making sense of the world, right? So when photons hit your retina, you don't perceive them, right? You're not perceiving individual packets of light hitting your eyeball. What you're perceiving is the objects out in the world that the light was bouncing off of. But in order to do that, your brain has to do all this inference. It has to do all this work to figure out what could be out in the world. And that, you know, requires calibration over, you know, years and years. As a baby, you're crawling around, you're making sense of your visual impressions by taking objects in your hand and putting them in your mouth. And you're sort of cross-calibrating with your with your other senses.

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  So, yeah, that process of perception is a process of inferring what's out in the world. And also, you know, what you should do about it. It's really used to inform your actions now.

• 1:45:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I've seen a ball a bunch of times and the fact that I've I know what a ball looks like. I've felt a ball. I've lived with a ball my whole life. That informs my perception of a ball.

• 1:45:27Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:45:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  I have heard of people who've been blind their entire lives and all of a sudden they gain their sight. And they've spent their life picking up a mug.

• 1:45:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now that they can see the mug, they're like, sorry, I can't do this. I know what it feels like, but I can't really see this mug.

• 1:45:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, there's some really, really interesting experiments on people who were sort of congenitally blind from an early age. And then, you know, say they had cataracts or something like that. And then they they had them removed and it can.

• 1:46:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, there can be long lasting sort of deficits in visual perception, especially things like depth perception. If they didn't have that early experience, you know, we were talking earlier about how the the young brain is so plastic and it's wiring up in response to to the experience that it receives. And there's a sort of a critical period when that has to happen in order for the the whole system to be to be set appropriately to the kinds of things that are out in the world. And if you miss that period, then yeah, there can be longer lasting kind of effects. But I wanted to just get back to the question of reality, because there are some people who say, okay, well, perception is just a construct. Right? And you can't, it's it's not a true representation of what's out in the world.

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  It's just things in your brain. Your brain is just creating reality and I mean, kind of, it's creating a picture of reality. But, you know, if there wasn't, if it wasn't an accurate picture, well, we wouldn't have it, right? I mean, all that machinery is really energetically expensive to use and to make. And so those perceptual systems that we have exist because they are, they allow us to adapt to things in the world. So if it wasn't giving us an accurate picture of what's out there, we wouldn't have them, right? So to me, it's, it doesn't make sense just because our perception is this kind of active inference to say, oh, I don't know whether reality exists or not. How could I? Well, you're still alive. That's how you could know.

• 1:47:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  I used to teach people to to paint. And when I would be teaching people to paint, like still life.

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  The first thing that I would teach them is is to remove language from what they're looking at.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:47:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  So if if you're to paint an orange, or no, let's just take an apple, you're to paint an apple. You have to forget that apples are green. If you're painting a road, you have to forget the language that roads are black. One, you have to remove what you've learned about these things so you can truly see. Because the fact is, a road, a road under the right light could very well be purple. That that's the color that you mix on the palette to do a good job at that road. It could be purple, yellow, blue. But as soon as your brain says, no, roads are black, you're fucked. You can't paint, same with apples. And and it's reminding me of, like you were saying there, the

• 1:48:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Perceiving things, there's a lot of automation, there's a lot of what we've known before. And is interpolation that we're filling in gaps to an extent.

• 1:48:39Speaker 03

  Well, there's a lot of expectation and I think you you absolutely see that you can see it in like optical illusions. Where you know, something appears the wrong size because if there's some contextual cue. And your brain knows that something in that context must be bigger or smaller and so on. And even when you are aware of them, it's really hard to get rid of that kind of illusion. But the other thing, like when you're talking about painting and so on, yeah, you need to get out of your own way. You can't be actively thinking about what something should look like because of what you know. You have to actually paint what you see or draw what you see.

• 1:49:17Speaker 03

  And actually, a nice trick for that, that I, you know, read about on learning to draw myself is to actually focus on the negative spaces.

• 1:49:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  So don't draw the object because you have a preconceived notion of what a chair looks like. Or what someone's arm looks like, or something that what their, what a face should look like. Instead, draw the spaces between the arm and the chair, for example. And that you have no preconception of what that should look like. And so you're free to just let the, let the perception actually be more accurate. So that now someone else looking at your picture will, will have the same kind of response to it.

• 1:49:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  And another thing around around perception there too. There was, I remember a wonderful story. So around, around the 1870s, the French, whatever the French were doing in the area that is now Saudi Arabia. The French were working with tribes there and these tribes were Muslim people. And they lived in the desert and they worked with horses a lot. So these tribes, they knew horses, okay? And then the French, as a gift to these people, they presented these people with a brilliant painting of a horse. And amazing, like if you and I saw it, we'd be like, that is the best painting of a horse I've ever seen. But these Muslim people, within their culture, you don't

• 1:50:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  draw things that God made. So you'd never draw a horse. Muslim art, or art in Islam, tends to be geometric shapes. And you don't see a lot of representational art, because it's kind of faux pas to draw anything that was created by God. So when the French presented these Islamic people in the desert with a brilliant painting of a horse, they couldn't see it. They couldn't, they couldn't do the brain mathematics to see the horse, a 3D object represented on a 2D space, because they'd never seen that in their lives. And to them, it was just a blob, a blur of brown. And the French were like, no, it's a fucking horse, like the one over there. And the lads

• 1:51:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  were like, I've never seen this before. I don't know what a 3D to 2D image is. Thanks for the gift, but it just looks brown to me.

• 1:51:31Speaker 03

  It's like, I guess, the invention of perspective in painting, which took so long, right? You know, and, yeah, and I think it was just people were saying, no, I know, roads are straight and they carry on, you know, with the lines parallel. So that's the way I'm going to draw them.

• 1:51:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  I've looked into, I've looked into perspective, right? So if you look at the history of paintings, like, so there's cave paintings going back 30,000, 40,000 years, right?

• 1:51:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  But perspective in painting really only comes about, it's around the 1200s. The first, the first to do it, there was, there was a fellow called Paolo Uccello, and another fellow called Giotto. And they basically painted paintings where it's like, the horses in the distance are smaller.

• 1:52:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Simple as that.

• 1:52:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it had never really been done. And one theory about how perspective came about in painting was it was because of architecture. So people i- in the area of Italy where Giotto and Paolo Uccello were coming from, they were in cities and in these cities, the architecture and the planning of the roads meant that they could introduce visual perspective to the paintings. And then that leap, that leap in human consciousness occurred where we were able to represent a 3D space on a 2D plane, which is really, really complex and we take it for granted now. But that was a massive leap, massive, massive leap to introduce perspective to 2D space.

• 1:52:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  And we'll leave it at that, Kev, because I think we'll end up talking about literally everything and anything for hours.

• 1:53:00Speaker 03

  We could do, yeah.

• 1:53:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  And thank, thank you so much. That was a wonderful, fantastic chat and.

• 1:53:07Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, it was my pleasure. Yeah, super interesting. Thanks.

• 1:53:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  And so have, have a lovely day. Dog bless. Dr. Kevin Mitchell, Dr. Kevin Mitchell there of Trinity College, professor, associate professor in Trinity College. You perpetual Kevin, you ten foot Brenda. Thank you so much for that magnificent chat. Thank you to all ye for listening this week. Go to sfi.ie to get some Science Week information. It's Science Week right now. Oh, um, I'll catch ye next week. I don't know what with a hot take of some description. Tomorrow morning, I'm gonna wake up bright and early and begin my hot take research. Check out my short film starring Robbie Sheehan.

• 1:53:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you read about Arsene Fogarty this Thursday on RT2 at 10 past 10 or on the fucking RTE player, right? Rub a swan. No, don't rub a swan. Wink at a cormorant. Marvel at the, the decomposition of a, of a snail's shell in November. Smell that the slurry like, the slurry like aroma from rotting leaves that you get in, in fucking November. Dog bless.

• 1:54:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Catch you next week.

• 1:54:41Speaker 00

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